Great writeup from Paste Magazine, which has put together some of the best coverage of the band over the course of the year. They interviewed Rado as part of the feature, and he had a lot to say about the year that was and what’s to come for Foxygen:

“We’re starting the new record, and it feels like all of last year, all the bad vibes, all the things that went down never happened. I’d really actually like to start over. We both would. We’re not embarrassed about anything. What happened happened, and all that stuff went down, and unfortunately whatever stupid bullshit, it was public because people were looking at us.”

[…]

“And then Sam broke his leg,” he continues. “And the public doesn’t really know that during that time was the time that we were the best, you know? We were just playing really, really awesome shows. We were really on our game. I think it was around that time we realized what was really important, which was our friendship over anger. I think it’s when we realized we got a little carried away.”

“Carried away” is a phrase Rado uses a lot to describe what he sees as the root of many of Foxygen’s problems; after reading characterizations of themselves online—France as “this crazy, drugged-out, incoherent rock star thing,” Rado perhaps as his foil—they began to buy into those ideas.

“People just made up this image of what the band was, and I think in a way, in some sort of demented way because Sam and I are actors, we sort of decided that that’s what it was gonna be, like we decided to kind of play into this persona that the public had created for us,” he explains. “That was the only way to keep it interesting. We never really wanted to be a normal indie band or something. So I guess as a way of dealing with all of the shit, the weird assumptions of people, was to actually play into that. And maybe it got a little too carried away. I can definitely say that on both of our parts, our roles that we were playing got a little too carried away…it’s not like we ever sat down and talked about it, but it sort of spun out of control…I feel like I lost myself a little bit in that last year.”

“But we stopped touring, we spent a couple months just like recuperating and then realized all of it,” he continues. “We realized we’re not actually this angry rock band; we don’t actually have these problems. This is just what people said incorrectly, they just made up about us, and we were kind of believing it. That was a big moment between Sam and I when we realized that we don’t hate each other. We got a little too carried away with that. That’s a pretty weird way of looking at it, but I really do think that’s it. We both do really feel that that’s what happened. We bought into not our own hype, but what people thought about us a little too much.”